‘Why aren’t there as many flies these days?’ and other excellent Telegraph readers’ questions

FormulaDriven asks:

“I am curious about how PlusWord puzzles are devised – it seems the trickiest part would be finding 10 answers that interlock on the grid (I’ve tried devising them myself and needed a lot of trial and error to get there). Do you use any kind of IT tools to help generate those?”

Chris Lancaster, Puzzles Editor, replies:

It’s great to hear that you enjoy PlusWord! The trickiest part of compiling the puzzles is definitely finding 10 five-letter words to fit in the grid. Excluding proper nouns, there are only around 4,000 suitable words – which sounds like a lot, but isn’t when trying to squeeze 10 of them into a grid. It’s a largely manual process, although I use a piece of software called Crossword Compiler when I get stuck.

It’s particularly hard to avoid using the same words on a very regular basis, and I lose count of the times that only certain words (such as ESTER, INANE, ENEMA and others with similar vowel patterns) are the only ones which will fit, so I need to backtrack and start again. It’s definitely far faster (and more enjoyable) to solve a PlusWord puzzle than it is to compile one!